The Press

MUD AND GUTS

By Robert La Franco
Forbes Magazine

Used to be you only had to come back from Vacation with a suntan.
Now if you aren't limping, No one will be impressed.

Slouched in a tattered leather
chair in the dingy lounge of Mike's Sky Rancho in Baja California, Mexico,
39-year-old Michael Ellis peels off the garish superhero gear he's worn all day.
It has carried him through 150 miles of dust, rocks and cactus. In the dim light
behind him, you can make out a travel poster on the wall of the terrain he's
just passed through. The poster shows a tangled heap of four jeeps piled up in a
desert ravine.

This is fun? The all-day trip from Ensenada to Mike's by dirt bike was a
bruising journey that ended with an hour-long high-speed race up an unpaved
pretzel of a trail. With a swarm of Kawasaki dirt bikes shrouded by dust clouds
and headed directly into a blinding late-day sun, the trail's every turn-with
threatening drops and no guardrails alongside-was a potential catastrophe.

Twelve riders started out, but only ten were sitting with Ellis in the
lounge. Sam Woo, the 43-year-old president of his own graphic design firm,
smacked into a horse and broke collarbone and five ribs. It took 11 hours to get
him to the care of a San Diego hospital. Keith Galanti, a 35-year-old
stockbroker, was missing but was found after dark frantically trying to find the
group-with no gas, no money and no Spanish.

"When you do this kind of sport, you don't worry about the little
injuries-they always heal," mused a stitched-up C.J. Ramstad as he limped toward
his macho medicine: a sizzling steak and a cold beer. "It's the big one-the
spinal injury-that's the one that scares you."

But not enough to spoil the fun by 47-year-old Baja 1000 champion Christopher
Haines, is booked through the end of March. This year Haines expects to top last
year's full slate of 300 riders; some of them are first-time dirt bikers, and
some have never straddled a motorcycle before. Haines' past tours have included
a management group from Oppenheimer Capital and several Young President
Organization chapters.

"In my business I gamble huge every day," says Ellis, the owner of Matrix
Communication, a Minneapolis based telecommunications company. "This is just
gambling in a different way."

Maybe it's the absence of war in this generation, but there is something that
drives deskbound people to spend their free time taking unnecessary chances with
life and limb. The Englewood, Colo.-based Adventure Travel Business Trade
Association says there are about 8,000 U.S. companies packaging tours for
adventures, generating some $7 billion last year-double the figure of a decade
ago. Outward Bound's Wilderness School-a hardy test of physical and emotional
mettle-reports a 66% increase in executive participation between 1992 and 1996,
from 3,000 to about 5,000 people. White-water rafting, shark diving, ballooning,
heliskiing, rock and mountain climbing, plant-gathering among 35-foot anacondas
in the Amazon-if you want to gamble (with your limbs as the chips), someone has
packaged a tour for you.

"Risk-taking is the keystone American quality," says Frank Farley, a
psychologist at Temple University. "Capitalism is fraught with risk."

Baja is good place for taking these risks. The barren 1,200-plus-mile
peninsula is so harsh that in three centuries of effort the Spanish couldn't
successfully colonize it. The Americans passed on it altogether after winning it
in the Mexican-American War. Today it is a largely undeveloped theme park for
thrill-seekers who, unlike Haines' more pampered crowd, travel for weeks along
its back trails carrying only gas containers, food, camping gear and global
positioning devices. "On those trails there is no time to think about work, your
office, your life-it's the perfect release," says Robert Horowitz, a vice
president at International Management Group who rode with a Baja pack. "Every
turn is a complete unknown. The terrain is so threatening you have to focus or
you're skidding straight down a mountainside into a cactus."

There are rewards, camaraderie, challenge and bragging rights, to name a few.
An evening spent sipping Mexican beer and shooting cactus cocktails at Mike's
while trading war stories about wipeouts is potent stuff. Then, of course, there
is the scenery. Lush mountains bordered by moonscapes and a pristine lake
reflecting the full range rising above it. Endless miles of scraggly 20-foot
cacti and, further away, the Pacific stretching endlessly from the rocky cliffs.
You could even take a day to explore a few Indian towns rich with ranchero
history.

But who are you kidding? That's like the old I-read-Playboy-for-the-articles
argument. When you open the throttle on one of these bikes, you turn it into a
two-wheel tank. Scenery is just a backdrop for when you stop to catch your
breath.

"When you get in that group your competitive spirit just starts flying," says
38-year-old Lee Whaley, a Minute Maid executive who rode with Ellis last
October. "So you twist it a little harder and start stretchin' that envelope a
little bit.

There were times when I had to pull back and just say, 'Whoa, I'm not a young
man anymore. I've got to be at work Tuesday morning.'"

Lately the more extreme consequences have been much in the news. Michael
Kennedy's death on the slopes of Aspen on New Year's Eve stemmed directly from
the daredevil notion of playing football on skis. John Denver died in a kit
plane accident last year.

Remember, though: Thousands of people do get injured playing golf. What kind
of risk is that?